The Meaning of Easter

At the first Easter, a great cosmic drama was enacted by a group of conscious players, the leading role being taken by Jesus. Only He had reached the very high state of consciousness necessary for making the divine sacrifice. But His supporting players were also important; without them, the drama could not have been staged, and the inner meaning would have been lost.

By "staged", I don't mean that anything about the first Easter was fake. On the contrary, everything was starkly real. Christ was truly betrayed, He truly suffered, and truly rose from the dead on the third day. Nobody else has attained the degree of consciousness that Jesus had reached, but what He did showed the way that all could follow. And the enormous supernatural energies that were released at His death and resurrection made that possible.

In the drama of the innocent victim hanging on the cross, we're shown the nature of our daily reality.
Constantly, every hour, every day, until we finally achieve some degree of awareness, we sacrifice our Essence, our inner being, to the myriad petty I's that make up our False Personality. We betray our conscience and crucify our Real I.

Because our Higher Emotional Centre can't think in words but only in images, Conscious Humanity had to act out this terrible drama in such a way that we couldn't forget it. It was the only means by which we could be shown our true nature, our sinfulness. Sin, in the Greek, actually means "missing the mark", and every time we act mechanically we are spiritually falling short of what ought to be our target, our progression towards a higher state of consciousness.

Wars, murder, theft, slander, envy, gluttony, avarice - everything that steals our consciousness and diminishes our Being - are among the results of mankind's lack of awareness. Both on a large scale and in our own small lives we choose Barabbas, the robber, the False Personality who steals our energy and condemns us to greater and greater mechanicalness.

And when we do this, we crucify Christ. Christ suffers every single day because of our mechanicalness. He freely accepts this suffering, knowing it is necessary for us to witness and to share in it, as we undertake the painful task of remembering ourselves and growing closer to our Real I. As we see images of the Crucifixion, we should remember that this is our doing, that it is our own very low state that has caused and will continue to cause this suffering. And by seeing it depicted in this dramatic, bloody and horrific way, we may be shocked into remembering ourselves - at least for a while.

The Catholic Mass includes a prayer of repentance for sin, when the congregation strike their breasts and say "Though my fault, through my fault, through my own most grievous fault". The Mass reenacts the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and in this prayer everyone present relates Christ's death to their own sinfulness.

Every participant in the drama of the Crucifixion should be seen as an "I" in us. We are the ignorant crowds, the apathetic Pilate, the robber Barabbas, and the wavering, bewildered disciples. We are Peter when we deny all that is highest in us; Peter again when, remorseful, we weep for what we have done and find the strength to persevere towards the light.

We are Mary, the helpless, devoted mother as she stands by the cross watching her perfect Son put to death because of sin.

We are all the I's that look away, deny, choose the easier path, cheat, and lie. And we are the I's that justify our own evil actions, as Pilate and the Temple priests did.

The life and death of Jesus followed centuries of gradually dawning awareness. They did not spring from nothingness. God had prepared the way for this great cosmic event by inspiring different philosophies and religions during the eras which preceded his birth.

Druids and Greeks had rituals of dying and rising gods; so did the Egyptians in their own mysteries of Osiris. The Jews were led out of the slavery in "Egypt", the land which represented sensuality in the Bible, into a moral, ethical code which was entirely new in the world, ethical monotheism.

As Teilhard de Chardin put it, "...the beauty fashioned through its age-long history by ancient Egypt, the anxious expectancies of Israel, the patient distilling of the attar of oriental mysticism, the endless refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all these were needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory processes were cosmically and biologically necessary that Christ might set foot on our human stage. ... When Christ first appeared before men in the arms of Mary, he had already stirred up the world."

And when Christ died, announcing from the cross that "It is finished", his death released a tremendous burst of energy into the universe. He gathered up everything that had gone before, and transformed it in a blaze of light. The old patterns were now outgrown. Something radically new had happened, and it changed history.

In the Work we think of the higher hydrogens that we can create when we work on ourselves; Christ's own transformation produced energy at an unimaginably high level, and the wonder is that we are invited to add to His own redemptive work by our small, personal, daily sacrifices. Everything we do can be offered up to Him, to Conscious Humanity, for their saving and transforming work, which reaches backwards and forwards in time from that one huge, shocking event in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago.

The physical importance of the sacrifice is often overlooked, but Mrs Pogson reminded groups of the effect of Christ's blood falling upon the earth, some of it collected in the chalice of Joseph of Arimathea and honoured as the "Holy Grail".  This blood, she said, was so charged with higher energies, so purged of everything base, that it has purified the Earth ever since, and will go on doing so as long as is necessary: that is, until mankind as a whole takes a step forward towards consciousness.

And the picture of the Precious Blood falling on the earth also carries the meaning that in us, too, the "earth", the ground of our Being, can now be purified.

The resurrection which followed on the first Easter Sunday gave the disciples another enormous shock, and illustrated for them and for us how dying to oneself in one form can lead to a rising on a higher level, a total transformation of what went before.

At Easter, we can already see and feel new natural energies arising in the Earth. Flowers begin to bloom, trees blossom, birds build nests and lay their eggs. Nature pulsates with new life. So too in us there can be new life at Easter, because that is the eternal purpose of the Crucifixion.