The Bible and Wisdom II

Initiation stories are always told to us in a veiled manner. The miracle of Lazarus is nothing other than the wonderful and powerful representation of how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament, how the initiate, with his disciple who had been in a death-like state for three and a half days, called the soul back into the body after it had made its journey through the spiritual world, only to be awakened afterwards by Christ himself. All this is easy to understand for those who know something about it, for it is the language in which initiation stories are told. “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” This means: outward appearance as a revelation of the inner being; so that the sentence can truly be translated as: “The sickness is not unto death, but that God may be revealed as an outward appearance, so that he may also be revealed to the senses.” In the personality of Lazarus slumbers the deeper human essence, which has the ability and the power to be developed in him in a mysterious way, to be led up into the spiritual world, so that he could recognize the essence of Christ himself, the Son of God. But this power first had to be developed. He developed it in Lazarus so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed and reveal what the Son of God is. Thus, Christ Jesus creates in Lazarus the first person who knows from his own inner observation who Christ Jesus actually is. At the same time, this miracle — for it is a genuine miracle for those who only accept the outer physical laws — shows what the disciple in question must go through during the three and a half days, for this is equivalent to genuine death, because the etheric body and the astral body are lifted out of the physical body and only the physical body remains.