Saturday: Why Not Go Direct to God?
WEEK 5
SATURDAY
WHY NOT GO DIRECT TO GOD?
John 14:6-9
There is one thing we must consider before we leave this subject of the mastery of religious paraphernalia. All human mediatorial acts and rites and ceremonies are pushed out of the center as necessary and placed on the margin as helpful accessories; and one Mediator, Jesus Christ, takes the center as the only necessity between God and people.
But someone asks: Why Jesus? Why not go to God direct? Why a mediator at all? The answer is that no one goes to God direct. God has to be mediated to us. If you try to go to God direct, you go through the category of your conceptions of God. Those conceptions of God mediate God to you. But they are not God, they are your conceptions about God. They are more or less false and more or less true—false God.
Apart from Jesus we know little about God. Jesus is God disclosing the divine self to us in understandable terms, human terms. Jesus is not our view of God but God’s view of Godself. God is the divine self-disclosure. Jesus is not therefore a third person, standing between us and God. He is God come to you; and when you take hold of Jesus, you take hold of the very self of God. So Jesus is a mediator only in the sense that he mediates God to you.
Just as the word mediates the thought of the speaker—so that when you take hold of his word, you take hold of his thought—so Jesus is the Word of the Eternal Mind. He is the Mind come to you in the Word. If you take hold of the Word, Jesus, you take hold of the thought, God.
That is not theory, it is fact—fact attested through the centuries. The more you deepen the Christ-consciousness, the more you deepen the God-consciousness. Jesus doesn’t rival or push out God; he intensifies God. A man of Unitarian faith said to me, “I wish you would come to our convention and help us to get God back; we are becoming a humanism.” Interesting that they who had focused on God were losing him, and I who focused on Jesus Christ had found God, or rather God had found me. Jesus mediates God to us—the one Mediator.
O Jesus, I thank you that in you I find God, and what a God! My heart bows in the utmost satisfaction. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: When I know God in terms of Jesus, then I know God, the authentic God.