The Gospel of John (Part 4)

This is the 4th part of a series on the Gospel of John.Episode one began with an overview of all the Gospels. My intention was to show both what they share, and how they differ. Among what they share is that we don’t know who wrote them. They are not eye-witness accounts. They were written generations later, in a different language.They differ, in that each portrays a different Jesus. In Mark, (the first Gospel written), Jesus is a simple itinerant preacher. In Matthew he is the Jewish Messiah, In Luke, the prophet and teacher, and in John (the last to be written) Jesus is the Cosmic Christ.In weeks two and three, we began to examine the Gospel of John from the perspective of the cosmic consciousness revealing itself through this book.From this point of view, what Unity calls a metaphysical interpretation, every character, every event, every word takes on significant meaning as some aspect of our Being, or of a transcendent idea. Some examples we covered were: “The word”, as the infinite potentialities of Being. The lamb of God, as the consciousness that removes error thought from the mind of the individual who has reached that level of realization.John the Baptist as the illumined natural man. Meaning that stage in us when we reach intellectual knowledge of a higher reality, thus begin the journey to the unfolding of the Cosmic Consciousness within.Finally, we addressed Jesus as the voice of the universal consciousness, speaking not as the Redeemer of Sin, but as the Revealer of Truth. Thus, when we hear Jesus make the I AM statements, or say to Nicodemus that he must be born again, he is not making human references, he is speaking as the divine essence within each of us.