4. Self-Sacrifice of Selfishness

Now Christ enters, not into an Archangel but into the human being known to us as Jesus of Nazareth. This sacrifice took place because Lucifer and Ahriman threatened to create confusion about the human ‘I’. It is the ‘I’ that makes us human and gives us great power in the Cosmos. This, of course, is what Lucifer and Ahriman, seek to undermine. Well, not so much undermine, but create a force of resistance that we must overcome.

“The ‘I’ could have failed to develop the capacity to retain its entity as self.” as Rudolf Steiner put it. “what comes from the soul would have been torn away by all elemental forces originating in wind, air and waves.” Next time we stand on the coast in a weather event we can imagine what this would be like.

We sometimes feel this disarray when we can’t seem to ‘pull ourselves together’ to focus on things. This scattering can only be gathered together when we begin to experience something higher, the I Am which is our True Self; we can only come to this experience through Christ, there is no other way.

In our gratitude for the order Christ created by entering into the body of Jesus who was immobilised on the cross at Golgotha we join him. At the same time, we must feel connected to his pain, not from the nails in his hands and feet, but from the agony of entering into the human physical condition for the first time. In this way, he also had his first experience of fear. It is not about focussing on crucifixion itself, but on its purpose for us.

“This fourth sacrifice meant that “Human thinking, at risk before the advent of Christ, and redeemed by Christ’s incarnation in its “I”-informed and “I”-governed order and clarity can and must seed our future evolution. The Christ impulse can enter and inform this thinking in so far as the human being succeeds in developing it further in a selfless, body-free way (pure thinking) and offering it up to the world of spirit and its revelations.”*

Our task is to feel deep gratitude to all the beings who brought us the gift which makes us fully human and fully divine. Especially on June 24, we can be grateful to John the Baptist who was the only human being who could have heralded in the Cosmic Christ, often signified by the descending dove.

*The Sufferings of the Nathan Soul by Peter Selg http://www.bookdepository.com/The-Sufferings-of-the-Nathan-Soul-Peter-Selg-Matthew-Barton/9781621481508 or a different translation of the lecture “The Four Sacrifices of Christ” is available free here http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/ForSac_index.html