Glorification

By Nathaniel Dandridge Pendleton
1941

Part V
THE LAST STATES

VII. THE PASSION OF THE CROSS

"And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. . . And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.  And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, He said, Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit; and having said thus He gave up the spirit." (Luke 23: 44 - 46)

The rending of the veil of the temple was immediately significant of the Lord's death through which He entered into the Divine of the Father by dispersing all appearances, including those of the highest heavens.  At the same time He opened passage to the Divine Itself by His Human made Divine. (See A. C. 2576:5)  In opening that passage the Lord also underwent His final temptation by which His racial inheritance was cleared of its hold upon Him.  Nothing thereafter stood in the way of His full glorification, whereby in mind and body He became Divine, even as His Soul was Divine from birth.  Also by His death He entered into the full power of extending mercy to all repentant sinners.  This transfer of power enabled men to become regenerate in His name.  For this He was born, and to this end He was ever victorious in overcoming the racial evils as they entered by way of His mortal frame.

The Lord was born into the world in fulfillment of the Scripture prophecy concerning the seed of woman.  On the cross He fulfilled that part of the prophecy which told of the serpent's bruising His heel, by which was signified the death of the infirm human born of woman, which resulted in the unition of His mind and resurrection Body with His Soul.  As to His death, something of incomparable import should be noted.  Not only did He, by way of death, enter into full and final union with His Soul, called the Father; but it is now revealed that that union was to become and be a reciprocal union of the primordial Divine and the ultimate Human Glorified; since by virtue of that reciprocal not only did the Father glorify the Son, but the Son also glorified the Father.  This mystery is central to all the arcana bearing upon the Lord's temptations and His consequent glorification.*

* See sermon on Intercession and Reciprocal Union.

The fear of death is as if inborn with every man, while the love of life is instinctive.  Life and its love are implanted in the very body of man.  As a man born of woman the Lord could not but sense the fear of death in its deepest implications, and so it was, that as His death drew nigh, He cried, saying, "My God, My God, Why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

Natural death is a withdrawal of life from the body - of life as circumstanced in the body.  No longer was the Lord to be a Man among men - no longer to be clothed with a body subject to death.  Death ever accompanies this world's life and is basic to every change of state, every temptation.  The Lord's temptations, from the first, all carried the sign of the cross and the fear of death.  While He prayed that the cup of death might pass from Him, yet He added, "Not My will, but Thine be done."

On the cross He encountered the final and unified assault of evil which sought supremacy through His death, but just therein evil met its total failure.  The death of His maternal body made way for His Divine Supremacy.  It was His conclusive victory, whereby His glorification became entire.  Through the power of His supremacy men were released from the overweight imposed upon them by their self-bondage to evil.

It could not be but that He, as a Man in the world, should experience successive temptations, for like all other men borne of woman He was subject to the afflictions of the flesh.  Unless He had been continuously reborn from God, He could not, in bearing our iniquities, have become the Savior of the race.

But why on the cross was He forsaken of God?  This may be taken as His most profound and final illusion, even as it was His last temptation.  Some illusion pertains to every temptation.  It is that which rouses man to active resistance.  It was the same with the Lord, with this difference - that He, from Himself, in perceiving His abandonment overcame the illusion of this deepest of all temptations, and with it all evil in one complex.  Resistance to evil as of self is the ground of human freedom.  Only so may spiritual freedom be appropriated by man as an inner gift from God.  This is why man is interiorly in greater freedom when in temptations.  The appearance is otherwise, for temptations constrain; but it is only through constraint that a higher freedom can be attained.

The Lord's temptations, in their outer aspect, were not unlike man's, but they differed incomparably in severity, for the Lord must of need eradicate evil.  No man can do this, not even with the help of God.  Man can only put down his evils in the name of the Lord.  The Lord never at any time resisted evil as of Himself, but always from Himself - from the Divine in Himself, and this not directly from His Divine Soul, but from its derivations in His mind and body; that is, He overcame evil through the Truth Divine inbound in His Manhood.

The need on the cross was that His resistance to evil should be total, and this to the end that the Divine might be in fullness on all planes of His Human, so that there should be no longer an appearance of a God above Him, as in any degree distinguished from Him; but that He, in being forsaken of God, might become in Himself the Sole and Supreme God.  To say, therefore, that the Father forsook Him, is to say that the Father was not otherwhere than in Him.  His being forsaken, while in outer aspect it was a most profound illusion, and a temptation beyond measure; yet if inwardly viewed it may be seen as nonetheless a fact, that on the occasion of "His Passion, His Human was left to Itself." (See T. C. R. 126 and A. C. 10252)  And this to the end that His very body might be glorified, and He thereby might retain an ultimate sensuous life, deeper in its reach than is possible to the spirit of many mortal man.

His last breath on earth opened the way to His full unition with the Father, which carried with it a retention of His Divine Substantial Body within the sphere of nature.  Yet there was a death on the cross, entire and conclusive.  The Mary human passed away never to be resumed, and this though it lingered in the faith of the church - in the minds of those who founded their faith upon Him as He hung upon the cross and who thought of Him in Person as ever to be distinguished from God the Father and who confirmed this view of Him by Scripture appearances, all of which were, however, in inner truth dispersed by means of His last temptation - His death, which carried with it a quick dissipation of the remnant of His maternal body.

His last breath as a Man among men was, therefore, the signal for His entrance into the aditum of His Holiness.  This aditum bespeaks an interval between His death and His resurrection; but before this sacred mystery, we can only bow the head in humility of faith, and give praise to God who now may be spiritually seen in the glory of His resurrection Body.